Hamilton stages surprising finish

July 24, 2003|By Bonnie DeSimone, Tribune staff reporter.

BAYONNE, France — Tyler Hamilton's 2003 Tour de France always will carry an asterisk. Now it has an exclamation point, as well.

Determined not to be relegated to a poignant footnote, the 32-year-old Massachusetts native insisted on staying in the race after a devastating Stage 1 crash that left him with a V-shaped fracture on his right collarbone.

Wednesday, he won the first Tour stage of his career, forging ahead of the field on an extended solo breakaway that would have been unthinkable two weeks ago.

His normally placid blue eyes scrunched tight with pain, his head bobbing with the effort, Hamilton opened a gap of as much as 5 minutes 21 seconds over the peloton and crossed the finish line just less than two minutes before the pack.

"Today has really made up for everything," said Hamilton, who lopped off 2 minutes 27 seconds of his deficit to race leader Lance Armstrong and is in sixth place, 6:35 back. Armstrong maintained his margin of 1:07 over Germany's Jan Ullrich.

"This morning I was still seventh overall, and under the circumstances, I had done a respectable Tour so far," said Hamilton, a seven-time Tour rider who now leads the Denmark-based CSC team. "I knew without the injury I could've been in a better position. But after today I think I can forget about the disappointment."

Hamilton's chances at the podium are faint at best. He remains almost four minutes behind third place Alexandre Vinokourov of Kazakhstan with just two sprint stages and the final individual time trial left before the finish in Paris.

But anyone who has watched Armstrong's former sidekick over the last fortnight would be leery of underestimating him.

Armstrong, who during the cycling season lives in the same apartment building as Hamilton in the historic heart of Girona, Spain, embraced his friend and ex-teammate after the stage, taking care to squeeze Hamilton's left shoulder.

"It was the best play of the Tour de France," said Armstrong, who has had a few spectacular moments himself. "When he went in the beginning, I thought, whoa, Ty, that's a bold move."

Hamilton's physical and mental journey to this point has been one of incremental improvement, putting meat on the athletic cliche of going day-to-day.

A year after finishing second in the Tour of Italy with a fractured shoulder, Hamilton was pointing at 2003 as his first in a true team leadership role. The injury interrupted what had been a sensational season that included victories in Liege-Bastogne-Liege and the Tour de Romandie.

He struggled terribly in the team time trial during the Tour's first week, but held his own surprisingly well in the Alps and Pyrenees. Hamilton also has had to answer doubters such as Telekom team director Walter Godefroot, who a week ago called Hamilton's distress "an American PR stunt," and has denied speculation his performance has been influenced by the ongoing filming of an IMAX movie featuring him.

"Walter has the right to his own opinion," Hamilton said. "I welcome him to come to the team hotel or the team bus and take a look at the X-rays. He's more or less calling me a liar, and the team a liar. I don't like that. But c'est la vie [that's life]."

Wednesday, Hamilton nearly botched his chance at unexpected glory, falling behind as the peloton split on the descent of the stage's first climb.

Several of his teammates came to his rescue, dropping back to help him close the gap.

"They had to really dig deep, and I think they paid a big price for that big effort to bridge back up," Hamilton said. "I was mad at myself, and I really wanted to repay them and have a good stage [Wednesday]."

Hamilton had a near-flawless ride the rest of the way, joining a 10-man attack group and pulling away near the summit of the Col de Bagarguy, never to be seen again.

On paper, Wednesday's stage didn't look as if it lent itself to heroics, with mountains in its midsection giving way to rolling and finally flat terrain. But CSC team director Bjarne Riis on Wednesday morning encouraged Hamilton and his teammates to think big, recalling his own stage victory on similar topography during his victorious 1996 Tour.

As Hamilton approached the finish, an exultant Riis pulled the team car alongside him and reached out, clasping Hamilton's right hand and putting a slight strain on that still-tender side.

How he did it: Hamilton joined a breakaway about 34 miles into the stage, went solo on the second climb and opened enough of a lead that the peloton couldn't reel him in on the 40 miles of rolling and flat terrain in the stage's last third.

What to expect: A tired peloton will roll to the wine capital of Bordeaux, one of the six original stage cities of the 1903 Tour. The course is pancake flat and will end with a sprint if anyone has legs left.